Monthly Archives: March 2015

I have been overweight for most of my adult life. Most of the time close to the margin of obesity. As one can imagine I tried a lot of diets and fiddled around a lot with my caloric intake for weight loss.

To start: here are my Withings weight data from the last three months. What worked and what did not?

Weight Chart

Being overweight is no fun for a lot of reasons. So motivation (read: pressure) to get off these extra pounds was quite high.

What did not work for me and why

Formula shake drink diets -> was hungry most of the time, inconvenient as I had to cook a meal in the evening

Extreme low carb, low cal (e.g. Scarsdale Diet) -> energy level dropped too much, was not able to maintain for a longer time

Low fat diet -> often high ammounts of carbs which forced me to increase my anti glucose medication, which leads to more insulin, which probably leads to increased storage of body fat. Worked but was too slow.

Fasting -> managed to do 11 days in a row (and proud of it), lost a lot of weight, regained it in a month

Low Carb, High Fat -> was okay but did not give me any weight loss. But I was able to keep my weight despite lots of fat or oil.

Medication -> I once took Reductil which made me thirsty beyond any comfortable level. And blood pressure went up significantly.

What worked – Managing my calorie intake for weight loss

I simply ate less calories. This sounds unsexy and maybe it is. But if it works for my metabolism, why not?

This the 1970 way of loosing weight – how did I use my 2015 knowledge for improvement?

EODF -> every other day fasting gave me the best and most reliable results. Fasting seems to be good for my body. But I coin the weight loss to the missing caloric input on the combined fasting/eating days. It is the least complicated diet on the planet. In mid January I mostly did EODF which gave me the best results.

Online Resources -> calorie counting is pretty easy today. I use the FDDB-database. It takes five seconds to start the mobile app and scan the barcode to get the full nutritional values of a LOT of foods. Easy.

Mild low carb low cal-> as a type two diabetic my limiting factor are carbs consumed. I take no insulin so every gram has to be balanced by my pancreas. So I keep my carb input as low as possible. Especially in the morning where my blood glucose is high due to the dawn phenomenon. But lowering the carbs alone did not lead to weight loss – I had to cut the calories as well.

Resistant Starch Foods – Basmati Rice

I prepared one (raw) cup of basmati rice, two and a half cups of water, salt and two teaspoons of coconut oil. Cooking time 18 min. Rice was cooled down and put in the fridge for >14h.
Next day I prepared an asian inspired “resistant goreng” with the following ingredients (sorry, the tool only works in German):

Resistant Starch Goreng

I used only half of the rice for cooking and after checking the carbs and cals I decided to eat only half of the prepared meal (~ 400kcal and 38g carbs) – so eating only a quarter of the prepared rice. My girlfriend ate the rest of the meal- and liked it 🙂 .

Result

Resistant starch basmati rice gave me a rise of appx. 68 mg/dl from 38g of carbs. The “real” value will be higher as the Libre sensor reads 10 to 20% lower than my finger glucometer.

The rise of BG is not lower than what I would have expected from untreated rice.

Thinking about it – the preperation of rice with oil is surely something that is quite common. So if this had any positive influence some Type 1 diabetics would surely would have recognized this.

Conclusion

In this one person single meal study on resistant starch foodsresistant starch rice did not show any beneficial influence on BG compared to normal rice.

I decided to at least two tests as blood glucose seems to behave somewhat fuzzy. So I will retest this with some of the basmati rice leftovers (maybe cold rice salad) but do not expect any improvement.

UPDATE: I did a retest and had a much less rise in BG. I will keep an eye on this.

Another big surprise. I regularly use Xylitol (Xucker) instead of table sugar because it has low or no impact on blood glucose. Or is said to have. But there seems to be some “xylitol side effects”.

Today with my morning coffee and with the help of my freestyle libre I checked the influence of four heaped teaspoons of Xylitol in my morning coffee (together with one teaspon of low fat cream). And I nearly fell off my chair: it raised my BG from 123 to 171 mg/dl (fingerpick, freestyle 146)!

What kind of xylitol side effects are that?

I will redo this experiment tomorrow. Maybe the lowfat cream had some negative influence. I hope so.

Rats, so I have to wait another hour for my BG to go down before I can have my breakfast…

Four heaped tablespoons of xylitol in my morning coffee. What strange kind of xylitol side effects is this?

So I tried that out: I ate a bowl of dinkel (spelt) spaghetti at a local restaurant (Vapiano) with arrabiata sauce and parmesan. And a small coke light. I guess as the pasta portion was quite large there were 80g of carbs involved.

And I went walking.

Measurement Log

I started the meal at 17:10 and went on the road at 17:40. I walked at a normal pace. Not strolling and not “nordic walking” style.

According to my Freestyle Libre blood glucose had its peak at 18:15 with 119mg/dl and fell slightly.

After one and a half hours (!) at 19:20 I finished my walk and sat down comfy in my chair at home. As soon as I rested, my blood sugar started to climb again.

Frustrated by that I decided to leave my comfy chair and see what happens. At 19:50 I went out for another half hour and my blood sugar went down again.

Now something strange happened: I was tired and went to bed at 21:50. And during my sleep BS climbed again with its peak of 155 mg/dl at appx 23:10. What? Six hours after eating a lot of carbs?

My Interpretation

I CAN walk away blood sugar. With a bowl of spaghetti my blood sugar would have been otherwise much higher (definitvely above 180 mg/dl) after one hour

it takes a long time to walk away the glucose. Over 1,5h of walking time after each meal is nothing I can do on a regular basis

I have no explanation of the peak six hours later. Maybe some rebound effect or something else. Maybe I check if I can repeat that

BG values are higher than logged as the Freestyle Libre was appx. 20% lower on the first day of sensor usage than my fingerpick readings.

The Satiety Index – sounds like an interesting concept. Sure, a potato will fill me up more than a bell pepper – but how can I use that treating my diabetes?

According to the measurements on this page one is supposed to be three times more “satisfied” if he eats potatoes compared to white bread. Does that mean, you can eat only one third and still be full? Sounds like an interesting experiment.

The satiety index a little more elaborated is the Fullness Factor. It is an analysis of the macronutitients related to satiety and leads to a somewhat complicated formula to calculate satiety. I am not sure if it is really helpful but judge yourself:

How can I use the satiety index in my T2DM diet?

One problem is breakfast. Most food leaves me hungrier at lunch time than eating nothing at all. But I am hungry anyway. So I will start with a medium sized potato at breakfast – with an egg, 240 g tomato and 100g ham. As I do not want to waste too much calories on fat, I will use a non-stick pan and use no fat.
And – as I hate cooking in the morning – I will prepare potato, tomato, ham and salt/pepper mixture the evening before.

According to FDDB this will give me appx. 300 kcal and 22g of carbs, which is okay.

NB: eating potato salad would be easier to prepare beforehand. but I like to have some warm eggy-breaggy food.